Although chapter 3 of Moses the Egyptian is entitled “Before the Law: John Spencer as Egyptologist,” the last quarter of the chapter is devoted to Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), one of Spencer’s colleagues at Cambridge and a leading member of the Cambridge Platonists.

The following text is an experiment. It is the first of a series of “notes” on select chapters of Jan Assmann’s Moses the Egyptian. My primary aims are to encourage more people to read the book and to shape how they read it.

When I first read Jan Assmann’s Moses the Egyptian in June of 1997, it was a life-changing experience. Moses the Egyptian belongs to the rarest genre of academic books: the bold and exciting ones. Read more …